February
27 is the anniversary of the fire that destroyed the Reichstag and gave
Hitler a pretext to seize total power. How strong are America's
firebreaks?

Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and the court system.

—Donald Trump, tweet, February 5

On
the night of February 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler
became chancellor of Germany, fire gutted the central chamber of the
Reichstag in Berlin, the nation’s parliament building. To this day,
historians are still debating whether it was the work of a lone
arsonist, the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, who was caught at
the scene and soon confessed, or as journalist William L. Shirer later
asserted in his classic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, that
there was “enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that
it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own
political ends.”

But of one thing there was no doubt.

Within
hours of the fire, hundreds of people were arrested and put in
“protective custody” or sent to concentration camps, and the next
morning (in the words of the Cambridge University historian Richard
Evans), “the cabinet, which still had a non-Nazi majority, met to draw
up an emergency decree that abrogated civil liberties across Germany.
Signed by President Hindenburg the same day, it abolished freedom of
speech, freedom of assembly and association, and freedom of the press,
suspended the autonomy of federated states, such as Baden and Bavaria,
and legalized phone-tapping, the interception of correspondence, and
other intrusions.”

The decree was the first of two major measures
that eliminated all institutional checks and gave Hitler absolute
dictatorial powers. The second, passed a month later by the Reichstag,
gave Hitler plenary power—the power to enact laws without any action by
the parliament whatever. Quoting Evans again,

The Nazis used them
to bludgeon their opponents into submission and their allies into
compliance. By the summer of 1933 all opposition had been crushed, more
than a hundred thousand Communists, Social Democrats, and other
opponents of the Nazis had been sent to concentration camps, all
independent political parties had been forced to dissolve themselves,
and the Nazi dictatorship had been firmly established.

Could it happen here, as the historian Robert S. McElvaine of Millsaps College recently warned in the Huffington Post?

The
odds are that it could not—not in the same way and certainly not to the
same extent, despite Donald Trump’s megalomaniacal rhetoric and the
radicals in his entourage. Trump has no global agenda, clings
fanatically to no ideology, has no Weltanschauung, as Hitler had; his highest priority appears to be himself.

Nor
is America in 2017 like Germany in 1933. The two cultures are vastly
different and the technology that enabled Trump to gain political power
is just as accessible to his opposition. It’s also likely, judging by
his appellate court opinions, that Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee to fill
Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court, will, despite his
conservative leanings on issues like abortion, be faithful to the
Constitution’s protections of the press and free speech; he will not
eviscerate them.Moreover, in the view of CUNY historian Benjamin Hett,
whose 2014 book Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation Into The Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery makes a strong case that the fire was a Nazi plot,

The
media environment of today [he wrote me in an email]—with 24-hour cable
news, the internet, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc.—is so much more
intrusive than in 1933 (and the federal government is so full of people
who would be happy to leak incriminating information, not least in the
intelligence services) that the Trump administration would have no
chance of getting away with a deliberate terrorist attack as a pretext
for a coup d’état. … The other important difference is that Trump is
dramatically less popular than Hitler was in 1933 and there is
significantly more pushback from the population to the things he is
trying to do. Not that I wouldn’t put it past Trump and [Stephen] Bannon
to be thinking about this kind of thing.

But as a refugee from
Hitler (Class of ’41), I’m too much aware of the extent to which the
Nazis were underestimated as low-class clowns and thugs until it was too
late. Similarly, in the past election, the media, the pollsters, the
Democrats and millions of other Americans, and not just the left, also
underestimated Trump. In that context, I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt’s
post-war observation that “in 1933, indifference was no longer possible.
It was no longer possible even before that.”

On
August 25, 2009, Democratic Congressman Bart Gordon held a town hall
meeting in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A local news report called it “a
discussion about the nation's health care” that “led to loud boos and
heckling” from the crowd. On February 9, 2017, Republican Congresswoman
Diane Black — elected to Gordon’s seat in the fall of 2010 — held a town
hall meeting in the same city. A local news report headline proclaimed,
“Diane Black, GOP lawmakers faced defenders of Obamacare at lively town hall.” Sounds similar, right?

The zeitgeist is quickly setting in: Republicans right now face a backlash akin to what Democrats faced from the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Some have gone so far as to call this resistance
the Democratic Tea Party. It’s a convenient comparison: Democrats like
it because the Republican Tea Party was successful in 2010, and the
media appreciates it as a simple and straightforward story. I've been
guilty of leaning on it myself.

But
the Democratic resistance and the Tea Party actually differ in a number
of important ways, each of which tells a different story about where
our country is and where our politics may be headed.

For
starters, the Tea Party was forged as an opposition to a societal
reality in our country, while today’s resistance is opposed to a
political reality. The Tea Party began before the election of President
Obama, as a reaction to President Bush and the bank bailouts of 2008.
Tea Partiers believed that society and the economy had all left them
behind. The movement’s anger was stoked by the realization that the
country had changed to the extent that it would elect someone like
Barack Obama and support his “liberal” policies like the Economic
Recovery Act (the so-called stimulus) and the Affordable Care Act
(scornfully dubbed “Obamacare”). These members wanted the entire country
to revert to a set of values that more closely resembled what they saw
on Leave It to Beaver.

On
the other hand, the current resistance isn't based on a belief that our
country has gone astray from some former golden age. It's a political
backlash, borne out of Donald Trump’s policies and his presidency. Its
participants aren’t rejecting the social structures of American society.
They are embracing and defending our evolving structures of diversity
and inclusiveness. The people stepping forward to resist the Trump
Administration are standing against an Administration that doesn’t
respect the core values that this nation holds: that we are all equal
and that we can all achieve our own dreams.

Second,
these movements were forged in entirely different political situations.
Members of the Tea Party believed they had been marginalized and had to
fight back against this new oppression. They represented a minority,
losing the 2008 elections by almost 200 electoral votes and 10 million
people, while Democrats gained a more significant majority in the House
and a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate. Headlines
announced a permanent progressive majority. The Tea Party disapproved of
their country going in this new direction, which bred their movement’s
anger.

It
is a disgrace which gets worse with every day that passes,” one
observer wrote of the deteriorating political scene we know all too
well. “Politics everywhere and everywhere the terrorism of the Right….
It is astounding how easily everything collapses.” He added, “It is
shocking how day after day naked acts of violence, breaches of law,
barbaric opinions appear quite undisguised as official decree. Each new
decree, he said, was “more shameful than the previous one….. The
Liberals tremble.” And finally: “I for my part will never again have
faith in Germany.” Thus wrote Victor Klemperer, a Jewish German scholar,
in the first months of Hitler’s ascension. Historians have spent
decades examining how Germany, an allegedly rational and highly cultured
society, became unhinged. Future historians will no doubt be examining
how America, the paragon of liberty, became unhinged. The simple answers
are, respectively, Adolf Hitler and his acolytes, and Donald Trump and
his parade of right-wing enablers, from the FBI to border patrol agents
to white nationalists to plutocrats. But there are deeper answers, and
they are far more frightening, with far-wider implications than the
one-man theory.

They are answers that we Jews understand.

Of
course, Jews don’t have to be told to be suspicious of analogies to
Nazi Germany. We know they are usually facile, overwrought and
wrong-headed, and that they can trivialize the greatest tragedy in the
history of humankind. America is not Nazi Germany, Trump is not Hitler.

We
are not headed for the genocide of refugees, only for their ban or
deportation, to protect us, Trump says, from possible saboteurs, even if
that echoes Hitler’s “indignant denial,” according to Klemperer, that
he was accusing all Jews of threatening the state: “No harm will come to
loyal Jews.” And however much the language of “round up” and
“deportation” has a terrifyingly reminiscent ring for Jews, Trump has no
real interest in political power or programs, only in personal
adulation. He is our panderer-in-chief.

Still, one shouldn’t deny
that there are situations in which historical antecedents can be
instructive, not because, in this case, Trump is analogous to Hitler,
but because the underlying political dynamics of Trumpism to those of
Hitlerism may be so. Unfortunately, we Jews know an awful lot, too much,
about unhinged societies.

We understand cause and effect, which
is why Klemperer’s diaries, published as “I Will Bear Witness,” and
Harvard scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s now-famous analysis of
grassroots Nazism, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” ought to be required
reading in America now. Because whether or not Trumpism is a latter-day
incarnation of Hitlerism, both are predicated on something similar,
something we would rather not face, but something that is important to
discuss, especially as Jews, as Trumpism barrels forward: Hitler and
Trump are not the causes of a national movement of hatred; they are its
beneficiaries.

So how did Germany become unhinged?
According to Goldhagen’s analysis, it wasn’t all that “hinged” to begin
with. If you think, he says, of political life as a national
conversation, then one of the primary subjects of that conversation in
Germany, hundreds of years before Hitler rose to power, was
anti-Semitism. And just about every German participated in the dialogue.
As one woman in the oral history, “What We Knew,” put it, “There was
never any particular sympathy for the Jews,” which, of course, is
putting it lightly. This was the sentiment that Hitler exploited.

A brace of bills in the Tennessee statehouse is aimed at rolling back gains made by during Obama administration

Heather
MacKenzie bought her wedding ring at Wal-Mart. MacKenzie, now 38,
proposed to her wife, Charitey, by driving to the top of Tiger Hill in
Murfreesboro, a town located near the couple’s Tennessee home. The hill,
a favorite spot for preteen sledders during the winter, looks over the
entire town, as well as the vast expanse of the surrounding area. This
was where the MacKenzies had their first date.

The
pair said “I do” in June 2015, just days after the Obergefell v. Hodges
ruling legalized marriage between same-sex couples in their state. The
MacKenzies were wed in Nashville in front of the courthouse under a
magnolia tree.

Over a year later, the couple are expecting a
child: Charitey is 12 weeks pregnant with a son. A trio of recently
proposed laws, however, could jeopardize the future of their growing
clan. This legislation seeks to erase any hint of legal recognition for
LGBT couples in Tennessee, all but declaring war on the families of
same-sex parents living in the state.

Filed by State Rep. Terri
Lynn Weaver, House Bill 1406 would prevent a couple from listing on the
birth certificate the second parent (the spouse not giving birth) after a
woman becomes pregnant through artificial insemination. The legislation
would nullify a provision of the Tennessee Code Annotated 68-3-306,
which was issued as part of the Vital Records Act of 1977. The law
states, “A child born to a married woman as a result of artificial
insemination, with consent of the married woman’s husband, is deemed to
be the legitimate child of the husband and wife.”

If Weaver’s bill
passes, Heather would not be considered the legal guardian of the child
on the way. In order to gain that status, she would have to file for a
second-parent adoption, a process that’s both costly and time intensive.
The couple is raising a daughter the two adopted four years ago and it
cost $6,500 for Heather and Chariety to gain her custody.

“It’s a
lot of money, especially after you’re preparing for a newborn,” said
Heather, who works as a supervisor for an automotive distribution center
in Smyrna. “And now you have to go adopt your own child. We know a lot
of couples who have waited until their kids are in elementary school
because they waited to save up to do the adoption. If something happens
in between that time, it could be really harmful to your family.”

If
Charitey were to be in a car wreck, for instance, Heather could make
legal decisions for her but not for their expected child. The newborn
would have no rights to Heather’s inheritance or her insurance — an
added complication for the couple. If HB 1406 were to be passed, it
would go into effect on July 1, three months before Charitey is expected
to give birth. Heather receives health care benefits through her
workplace, but if the new baby would not be longer eligible for that
coverage, who would pay for the hospital costs?

The legislation
leaves a terrifying number of unanswered questions, few of which have
been answered by HB 1406’s authors. Although Weaver claimed in a Facebook post that the legislation is not intended to target same-sex families, she didn’t address the fact that her bill does exactly that.

WASHINGTON
— President Trump turned the power of the White House against the news
media on Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as “the enemy of
the people” and berating members of his own F.B.I. as “leakers” who he
said were putting the nation at risk.

In
a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump
criticized as “fake news” organizations that publish anonymously sourced
reports that reflect poorly on him. And in a series of Twitter posts,
he assailed the F.B.I. as a dangerously porous agency, condemning
unauthorized revelations of classified information from within its ranks
and calling for an immediate hunt for leakers.

Hours
after the speech, as if to demonstrate Mr. Trump’s determination to
punish reporters whose coverage he dislikes, Sean Spicer, the White
House press secretary, barred journalists from The New York Times and
several other news organizations from attending his daily briefing, a
highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press
corps.

The
moves underscored the degree to which Mr. Trump and members of his
inner circle are eager to use the prerogatives of the presidency to
undercut those who scrutinize him, dismissing negative stories as lies
and confining press access at the White House to a few chosen news
organizations considered friendly. The Trump White House has also vowed
new efforts to punish leakers.

Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press came as the White House pushed back on a report
by CNN on Thursday night that a White House official had asked the
F.B.I. to rebut a New York Times article last week detailing contacts
between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian intelligence officials. The
report asserted that a senior White House official had called top
leaders at the F.B.I. to request that they contact reporters to dispute
the Times’s account.

“The
fake news doesn’t tell the truth,” Mr. Trump said to the delight of the
conservatives packed into the main ballroom at the Gaylord National
Resort and Convention Center just south of Washington. “It doesn’t
represent the people, it doesn’t and never will represent the people,
and we’re going to do something about it.”

In
the West Wing less than three hours later, the consequences were
becoming clear. Mr. Spicer told a handpicked group of reporters in a
briefing in his spacious office that the White House would relentlessly
counter coverage it considered inaccurate.

by Leslie SalzilloFeb 23, 2017On
Thursday, during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC),
White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon admitted Donald Trump’s goal (Bannon’s goal)
in appointing new precarious cabinet members to head protective
government agencies like the EPA — is to dismantle and “deconstruct”
those organizations altogether. You can read that Daily Kos story by
Dartagnan here.

On the same day,
during a joint CPAC press conference with Chief of Staff Reince
Priebus, Bannon threatened the media with a quote that is undeniably one
of the most odious and perilous public statements made against the free
press by a White House official, on record. Chris Cillizza with The Washington Post cites Bannon.

“It's going to get worse every day for the media,”
Bannon said, insisting that the “corporatist” media would continue to
see Trump pursue exactly the sort of economic nationalism that
journalism allegedly despises. Then he added this call to arms: “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”

Cillizza
says the message from Bannon was unmistakable: The enemy of Donald
Trump and his team, is not really the Democratic Party, it’s the media.
He adds that presidential administrations and the press have often
experienced adversarial positions.

But what Bannon
and, by extension, Trump are up to is something very different than
simply an adversarial working relationship with the media. Bannon
doesn't want to change the media. He wants to totally dismantle the media. He wants to break its back and leave it for dead by the side of the road.

What
is somewhat ironic, more than disturbing, and almost comical, is that
Bannon is telling reputable reporters, including those at the Washington
Post, that the White House plans to destroy them. And rather than stand
up to him, reporters rush back to their laptops to write up the story,
staying respectfully neutral, while indirectly serving as a right wing
echo chamber.

Bannon and Trump are using the press to threaten and berate — the press. When
will the press, in unity, tell Bannon and Trump, to respectfully go
fuck themselves? It’s obvious Bannon and Trump desperately need the press to survive.
The mobster-like headman incessantly use the press every day, and seem
to forget that it was the media that held their hands throughout the
2016 campaign and essentially walked them into the Oval Office.

So why
does most of the media accept the degradation, which has become
constant? And why do they keep going back for more? Something has to
give, because Trump and his cast of hate-filled, lying fear mongers,
should not be allowed to use American media as a beacon for tyranny.
What’s that thing Dr. Phil likes to say?

"We teach people how to treat us."

Steve Bannon, the man who Time Magazine has labeled the
“The Great Manipulator,” lives up to the title as he continues to feed,
build, and control the growing far right extreme news rags like
Breitbart. Most everything that goes out to Donald Trump’s base of
fanatics is calculated, mostly false, insidious and dangerously
hate-provoking.

When
photographs recently emerged showing Sebastian Gorka, President Donald
Trump’s high-profile deputy assistant, wearing a medal associated with
the Nazi collaborationist regime that ruled Hungary during World War II,
the controversial security strategist was unapologetic.

“I’m a proud American now and I wear that medal now and again,” Gorka told Breitbart News.
Gorka, 46, who was born in Britain to Hungarian parents and is now an
American citizen, asked rhetorically, “Why? To remind myself of where I
came from, what my parents suffered under both the Nazis and the
Communists, and to help me in my work today.”

But an investigation
by the Forward into Gorka’s activities from 2002 to 2007, while he was
active in Hungarian politics and journalism, found that he had close
ties then to Hungarian far-right circles, and has in the past chosen to
work with openly racist and anti-Semitic groups and public figures.Gorka’s
involvement with the far right includes co-founding a political party
with former prominent members of Jobbik, a political party with a
well-known history of anti-Semitism; repeatedly publishing articles in a
newspaper known for its anti-Semitic and racist content; and attending
events with some of Hungary’s most notorious extreme-right figures.

When
Gorka was asked — in an email exchange with the Forward — about the
anti-Semitic records of some of the groups and individuals he has worked
with, he instead pivoted to talk about his family’s history.

“My
parents, as children, lived through the nightmare of WWII and the
horrors of the Nyilas puppet fascist regime,” he said, referring to the
Arrow Cross regime that took over Hungary near the very end of World War
II and murdered thousands of Jews.

In
the United States, Gorka, who was appointed deputy assistant to the
president on January 20, is known as a television commentator, a
professor and an “alt-right” writer who describes himself as a
counterterrorism expert. A close associate of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s
chief strategist, Gorka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House
think tank, the Strategic Initiatives Group.

Donald
Trump sneered at ‘angry crowds’ holding politicians to account. That’s
exactly what we’re doing – and we’re only just getting started

Americans
are flooding into town halls across the country. Fearful that their
country is being torn apart, they are turning out to protest their
representatives in record numbers. Clearly, the furious crowds have
gotten under Donald Trump’s skin. In a sneering tweet, the president
dismissed the “so-called angry crowds” at town hall events as “planned
by liberal activists.” We’ll take that as a compliment.

More than two dozen progressive activist groups are using ResistanceRecess.com, a site posted just last week by MoveOn.org,
to search among more than 500 local congressional events around the
country. Anyone can RSVP for an event and get a reminder email. So yes,
that’s evidence of planning – apparently more planning than goes into a
typical executive order issued by this White House.But here’s the thing: the crowds are unmistakably real, and the anger runs deep.

Many
of those showing up at town hall events have never done anything like
that in their lives. Just like the participants in the millions-strong
Women’s March and the spontaneous airport protests, the people filling
these town hall events are acting with moral urgency – and with a deeply
responsible sense of civic duty. Now it’s up to members of Congress to
decide how to respond.They can listen to their constituents, do
their jobs and pull the country back from the precipice that Trump seems
so determined to drive it off of. Or they can fail to heed the voices
of their own voters – and face the consequences at the ballot box.

But one thing’s for sure: even after Congress returns from recess, the resistance isn’t going anywhere. We voters are watching.

The intensity at the town halls is so high that more than 200 elected officials have reportedly
abandoned public forums in February entirely. But they’re in for the
worst of it. Where politicians are cowering in fear of their
constituents, citizens are forging ahead with town hall events of their own – with an empty seat at the front reserved for their member of Congress.

If
their invited representatives don’t show up, the absence will speak
volumes to the local news cameras and Facebook Live feeds streaming from
their constituents’ mobile phones. And to make sure nobody forgets that
their officials have gone AWOL, they’re buying local newspaper ads
calling them out and plastering milk cartons with “MISSING” stickers in
their local supermarkets.Resistance Recess is blowing the Republicans’ momentum out to sea. But it’s not just Republicans
facing energized crowds. In blue states and congressional districts,
citizens are thronging to public events as well, demanding
full-throated, no-fear resistance from Democratic lawmakers.

Their
message: when fundamental principles, and our very constitution, is at
stake, there is no room for compromise. Democrats who get the message
and pledge to fight are greeted by cheers. Those who still haven’t
realized that these aren’t normal times – and that their role now is to
resist, not appease – are engulfed by fierce chanting: “Do your job!”

One
of many, many infuriating parts of having Trump as the President is the
insufferable smugness of conservatives. When they’re not telling you to
“suck it up, snowflake” or trying to sell you fake news, they’re
gloating: “We suffered for eight years under that tyrant Obummer. Now
it’s your turn.”One man, Scott Mednick had enough with his Republican acquaintances and penned this powerful response:

“I
am surprised you would wish suffering upon me. That, of course, is your
right, I suppose. I do not wish harm on anyone. Your statement seems to
continue the ‘US v THEM’ mentality. The election is over. It is
important to get past campaigning and campaign rhetoric and get down to
what is uniting, not dividing and what is best for ALL Americans.

There
will never be a President who does everything to everyone’s liking.
There are things President Obama (and President Clinton) did that I do
not like and conversely there are things I can point to that the
Presidents Bush did that I agree with. So I am not 100% in lock step
with the outgoing President but have supported him and the overall job
he did.

And, if you recall, during the Presidential Campaign back
in 2008 the campaign was halted because of the “historic crisis in our
financial system.” Wall Street bailout negotiations intervened in the
election process. The very sobering reality was that there likely could
be a Depression and the world financial markets could collapse. The
United States was losing 800,000 jobs a month and was poised to lose at
least 10 million jobs the first year once the new President took office.
We were in an economic freefall. So let us recall that ALL of America
was suffering terribly at the beginning of Obama’s Presidency.

But
I wanted to look back over the last 8 years and ask you a few
questions. Since much of the rhetoric before Obama was elected was that
he would impose Sharia Law, Take Away Your Guns, Create Death Panels,
Destroy the Economy, Impose Socialism and, since you will agree that
NONE of this came to pass, I was wondering: Why have you suffered so?

So let me ask: Gays and Lesbians can now marry and enjoy the benefits they had been deprived of. Has this caused your suffering?

When Obama took office, the Dow was 6,626. Now it is 19,875. Has this caused your suffering?We
had 82 straight months of private sector job growth – the longest
streak in the history of the United States. Has this caused your
suffering?

Especially considering where the economy was when he
took over, an amazing 11.3 million new jobs were created under President
Obama (far more than President Bush). Has this caused your suffering?Obama has taken Unemployment from 10% down to 4.7%. Has this caused your suffering?Homelessness among US Veterans has dropped by half. Has this caused your suffering?

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

We
have to just come out with it, those of us who are American Jews in the
media. It's time we made Trump bathe in his own batshit.

Bradley BurstonFeb 19, 2017

If you're Jewish and you're still a Trump person after this week, you can stop reading this right now. It's not for you.

After
this week, there are only two kinds of American Jews left. There's the
denomination called Trump Jews, and there's the rest of us.

No
more. Now we know. That Thursday news conference stripped things down to
where everyone could see it: Donald Trump IS an anti-Semite.

It's
time for people like me to just come out with it – particularly those
of us who are American Jews who work in the media, those of us who've
honestly been trying hard to be as kind and careful and and nuanced as
we could.

It's time we made him bathe in his own batshit.

Cowed
by years of having the charge of anti-Semitism used as a weapon by the
Jewish right in a relentless effort to silence the left, we found every
intellectual excuse not to apply the charge to Trump.

We gave him
every break. Like the egghead freiers that we are, we cautioned that the
evidence for his being an anti-Semite was weak, anecdotal. But we said
this knowing that his racist, thunderously bigoted presidential
campaign, with its emphasis on media-bashing and high-profile Jewish
villains at the center of conspiracy theories, unleashed the most
dangerous wave of overt anti-Semitism in the United States since the
1930s.

And the only thing he did about it, was to smile and let it help him ride it to the White House.

We've been such nice little Jews for him for so long. We let him off the hook time after time after time.

But Yiannopoulos, who grew up Catholic and whose mother is Jewish, had already done plenty to offend Jews.

“Most
of the generation Trump, the alt-right people, the people who like me,
they’re not anti-Semites. They don’t care about Jews,” Yiannopoulos told
Dave Rubin on the Rubin Report last March when discussing the rise of hate speech on social media.

“They
may have some prejudice about Jews,” he added. “Like the Jews run
everything. Well we do. The Jews run all the banks. Well we do. The Jews
run the media. Well we do. You know they’re right about all that
stuff.”

When pressed by Rubin, Yiannopoulos insisted that Jewish
control over finance and the media is “not in debate,” explaining that
“Jews completely dominate the media. Vastly disproportionately
represented in all of these professions. That’s just a fact, it’s not
anti-Semitic to point out statistics.”

Yiannopoulos’s
rise coincided with a new wave of protest on college campuses and was
directly facilitated by conservative college students who booked him in
an attempt to raise even more ire from their liberal peers. At the same
time that conservatives were criticizing liberal college students as
vulnerable snowflakes making unreasonable requests of their
administrations, conservative college students and groups were enabling
the rise of an intellectual fraud at the cost of their own funds and
credibility.

Utopianism can be a form of naivete. Given the sheer
variety of students who gather on most college campuses, it would take
an impractical — if not Orwellian — effort for administrators and
faculty to anticipate their students’ every need. And given the
inevitable contradictions between those needs and desires, it would be
impossible to accommodate every single one of them. Hoping for a world
free of economic precariousness, myriad forms of discrimination and the
unkindnesses of youth may be impractical, given present political
conditions and university politics. The solutions that the left and
liberal college students propose may even be downright undesirable. But
as forms of callowness go, wanting to improve the world is hardly the
worst.

In
keeping with the broader themes of our political moment, Yiannopoulos
is less a conservative than a fellow traveler who vexes liberals for
profit.

Yiannopoulos’s embrace of the Gamergate backlash against
the diversity movement in video games helped make him a media figure in
the United States, but it seemed like a canny calculation rather than a
genuine commitment. His outrageous statements about everything from
Jewish control of the media to the Black Lives Matter movement to
transgender people have long seemed less the product of a genuine
worldview than a search for buttons to press, accompanying the jabs with
naughty snickers. To regard him as genuinely politically conservative
requires ignorance of conservative principles. To see his act as
outrageous rather than derivative requires an unfamiliarity with
subjects including art and gay history.

Simon
& Schuster has cancelled the publication of Milo Yiannopoulos’
book, and his fellow Breitbart employees have reportedly threatened to
quit if he is not fired.

A statement
from the publisher late on Monday said: “After careful consideration,
Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled
publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.”
Yiannopoulos confirmed the report on Facebook with a post: “They canceled my book.”

A
neo-Nazi ‘news’ outlet — the US’s top hate site — claims that ‘kikes’
are behind attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his ardent
anti-drug policies

NEW YORK — Back in 1971, the father of the American “War on Drugs” drew a connection between Jews and cannabis.

“You
know it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for
legalizing marijuana is Jewish,” president Richard Nixon said.
“What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter
with them? I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists.”

Most
Jews are not psychiatrists, of course, just as most marijuana law
reform activists are not Jewish. Nixon, however, wasn’t alone in calling
Jews out for their involvement in cannabis policy.

An
anti-Semitic article published by alt-right website The Daily Stormer in
late November entitled “Weed Kikes Attacking Jeff Sessions!” denigrates
a number of Jewish activists by name for opposing President Donald
Trump’s nomination of Jeff Sessions for US Attorney General, a position
that directs federal drug law enforcement.

“The Jews come at you
from every angle. Here they are coming at you from the weed lmao [sic]
angle,” the article says. “The marijuana legalization agenda is entirely
Jew.”

The Daily Stormer, recently ranked the US’s top hate site by
the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), took its name from Der Stürmer,
a Nazi newspaper started by Julius Streicher, who was later hanged for
war crimes at Nuremberg. SPLC calls the website a “malignant presence in
the real world.”

The Daily Stormer article, one of many displays
of anti-Semitism that seem to be gaining traction in America, doesn’t
merely attack Jews for being Jewish: The pretense of this article is
that association with Jews is inherently a smear against the drug reform
movement.

It sets a dangerous precedent, though its argument
itself isn’t very strong. The story names a prominent Jewish cannabis
activist, Adam Eidinger from Washington, DC, who led protests against
Sessions’ nomination, and later goes on to describe a cannabis-themed
seder that took place in Portland, Oregon last year.

Perhaps the
article’s strongest — or most accurate — point is acknowledging “a Jew
group that considers legalizing drugs as part of the Jew agenda of
‘Tikkun olam’ (fixing the world).”There are indeed many Jewish
cannabis activists (and many Jewish psychiatrists). Including those
interviewed for this article, many of these activists propose that drug
policy reform really does align with Jewish values like tikkun olam and
standing up against oppression.

The alt-right may be using
anti-Semitism to discredit marijuana law reform and clearly the
“marijuana legalization agenda” is not “entirely Jew,” as the article
states, but Jewish morality does play a role for some of the Jewish
activists who are motivated by social justice.

You
were elected as chief executive of the United States. I won’t belabor
the fact that you won with a minority of the popular vote and a little
help from your friends, FBI Director James Comey and Russian President
Vladimir Putin. The bottom line is, you were elected.

And this
does entitle you to certain things. You get your own airplane. You get
free public housing. You get greeted with snappy salutes. And a band
plays when you walk into the room.

But there is one thing to which
your election does not entitle you. It does not entitle you to do
whatever pops into your furry orange head without being called on it or,
should it run afoul of the Constitution, without being blocked.

You
and other members of the Fourth Reich seem to be having difficulty
understanding this. Reports from Politico and elsewhere describe you as
shocked that judges and lawmakers can delay or even stop you from doing
things. Three weeks ago, your chief strategist, Steve Bannon, infamously
declared that news media should “keep its mouth shut and just listen
for a while.”

Just last Sunday, senior policy adviser Stephen
Miller declared on CBS’ “Face The Nation” that “our opponents, the media
and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions,
that the powers of the president to protect our country are very
substantial and will not be questioned.”

What you do “will not be
questioned?” Lord, have mercy. That’s the kind of statement that, in
another time and place, would have been greeted with an out-thrust palm
and a hearty “Sieg heil!” Here in this time and place, however, it
demands a different response:

Has Trump's entire team been compromised by Putin? If so, everyone who continues to support him is complicit

On
Monday evening, national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to
resign after supposedly losing the “trust” of President Donald Trump by
failing to adequately and fully explain his phone conversations with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election.

As The New York Times explained on
Wednesday, FBI agents apparently concluded that Flynn had not been
“entirely forthcoming” in describing a phone call he had with Sergey
Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. That set in motion
“a chain of events that cost Mr. Flynn his job and thrust Mr. Trump’s
fledgling administration into a fresh crisis.”

As the Times
report elaborated, Trump “took his time” deciding what to do about
Flynn’s dishonesty and was none too eager to fire him.

But
other aides [such as other than press secretary Sean Spicer] privately
said that Mr. Trump, while annoyed at Mr. Flynn, might not have pushed
him out had the situation not attracted such attention from the news
media. Instead, according to three people close to Mr. Trump, the
president made the decision to cast aside Mr. Flynn in a flash, the
catalyst being a news alert of a coming article about the matter.“Yeah, it’s time,” Mr. Trump told one of his advisers.

This information is not new. The New York Times and other American news media outlets were aware of reports about Russian tampering in the 2016 election as well as an ongoing federal investigation of
Trump, his advisers and other representatives. Instead of sharing this
information with the American people during the election campaign, the
Times and other publications chose to exercise “restraint” and
“caution.” Decades of bullying by the right-wing media and movement
conservatives would pay great dividends.

Afraid of showing any
so-called liberal bias, the corporate news media demonstrated little
restraint in its obsessive reporting about the nonstory that was Hillary
Clinton’s emails. This, in conjunction with other factors, almost
certainly cost her the election.

In all, the Republican Party and
its voters have abandoned their Cold War bona fides and their (somewhat
exaggerated) reputation as die-hard enemies of Russia and the former
Soviet Union. To borrow from the language of spy craft, it would seem
that they have been “flipped” by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Despite
mounting evidence suggesting that Trump’s administration has been
compromised by Russia, his public continues to back him. The Republican
Party and its leadership have largely chosen to support Trump in a type
of political suicide mission because they see him as an opportunity to
force their agenda on the American people and reverse or undo by the
social progress made by the New Deal, the civil rights movement,
feminism, the LGBT movement and other forces of progressive change.

Republicans
in Congress have been saying for months that they are working on a plan
to repeal and replace Obamacare in the Trump era. Now we have the outline of that plan, and it looks as if it would redirect federal support away from poorer Americans and toward people who are wealthier.

A
white paper drafted by House leadership and the staff of the House and
Senate committees that oversee health policy details a structure that
could replace large sections of the Affordable Care Act. Crucially, the
proposal largely contains provisions that could be passed through a special budget process that requires only 50 Senate votes, and fulfills President Trump’s promise that the repeal and replacement of the law would take place “simultaneously.”

The
plan would make major changes in how health care is financed for
Americans who don’t get coverage from work. It would greatly expand the
number of Americans who could benefit from federal help in buying health
insurance, but it would change who benefits most from that support.

Obamacare,
as the A.C.A. is known, extended health coverage to 20 million
Americans through two main mechanisms. It expanded Medicaid coverage to
Americans below or just above the poverty line in states that
participated, and it offered income-based tax credits for middle-income
people to buy their own insurance. Obamacare was a redistributive law, transferring money from rich to poor.

The
Republican plan would alter both of those programs, changing the
winners and losers. It would substantially cut funding for states in
providing free insurance to low-income adults through Medicaid. And it
would change how tax credits are distributed by giving all Americans not
covered through work a flat credit by age, regardless of income.

That
means that the biggest financial benefits would go to older Americans,
like, say, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. If he didn’t have a job in
the Trump cabinet and access to government coverage, a 64-year-old
multimillionaire like him would get the same amount of financial
assistance as someone his age, living in poverty, and he would get
substantially more money than a poor, young person.

The
idea of matching tax credits to age makes some sense. Older people tend
to have higher medical bills, and insurers, even under Affordable Care
Act rules, charge them substantially higher prices. The new plan would
also simplify the current system, which requires verifying every
applicant’s income and then giving just the right amount of financial
assistance. It would also eliminate incentives for low-income people to
avoid earning more (higher earners can face a reduction in benefits).

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

The banality of evil. Evil depends on good people saying nothing.From The Baltimore Sun: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-airport-inhumanity-20170206-story.htmlBy Chris EdelsonFeb. 6, 2017A
week ago, men and women went to work at airports around the United
States as they always do. They showered, got dressed, ate breakfast,
perhaps dropped off their kids at school. Then they reported to their
jobs as federal government employees, where, according to news reports,
one of them handcuffed a 5-year-old child, separated him from his mother and detained him alone for several hours at Dulles airport.

At least one other federal employee at Dulles reportedly detained
a woman who was traveling with her two children, both U.S. citizens,
for 20 hours without food. A relative says the mother was handcuffed
(even when she went to the bathroom) and threatened with deportation to
Somalia.At Kennedy Airport, still other federal employees detained and handcuffed
a 65-year-old woman traveling from Qatar to visit her son, who is a
U.S. citizen and serviceman stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. The woman was
held for more than 33 hours, according to the New York Times, and denied
use of a wheelchair.

The men and women who work for the federal
government completed these and other tasks and then returned to their
families, where perhaps they had dinner and read stories to their
children before bedtime.

When we worry and wonder about
authoritarian regimes that inflict cruelty on civilians, we often
imagine tyrannical despots unilaterally advancing their sinister
agendas. But no would-be autocrat can act alone. As a practical matter,
he needs subordinates willing to carry out orders. Of course, neither
Donald Trump nor Steve Bannon personally detained any of the more than 100 people
held at airports over the weekend pursuant to the administration's
executive order on immigration, visitation and travel to the United
States. They relied on assistance.

The men and women who
reportedly handcuffed small children and the elderly, separated a child
from his mother and held others without food for 20 hours, are
undoubtedly "ordinary" people. What I mean by that, is that these are,
in normal circumstances, people who likely treat their neighbors and
co-workers with kindness and do not intentionally seek to harm others.
That is chilling, as it is a reminder that authoritarians have no
trouble finding the people they need to carry out their acts of cruelty.
They do not need special monsters; they can issue orders to otherwise
unexceptional people who will carry them out dutifully.

This should not be a surprise. The famous Milgram experiment
and subsequent studies suggest that many people will obey instructions
from an authority figure, even if it means harming another person. It is
also perfectly understandable (which does not mean it is justifiable).
How many of us would refuse to follow an instruction from a superior at
work? It is natural to want to keep one's job, even if at the price of
inflicting cruelty on another human being, even perhaps a child.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson